See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

This week, your LWN Development Page editor tried out the new browser in an operational context. The experience was somewhat variable.

Mozilla is getting very close to being a workable replacement for Netscape. The browser seems to be fairly stable and didn't crash on any of the web pages that were visited. The user interface has a nice clean look to it. Netscape users won't have to learn much to move to Mozilla since most of the same capabilities are present. One minor annoyance was that the alt-O "open URL" keyboard accelerator that Netscape uses seems to have been moved to alt-L "open Location" in Mozilla.

One similarity with Netscape that could go away is the function of the "File-Quit" menu item in subwindows such as the mail program. "Quit" causes the subwindow and the browser to go away instead of just the subwindow. A better font selection mechanism would also be welcomed; one has to go through a series of menu items to select a new font, and there is no font preview mechanism, so picking new fonts is a painful process. A useful addition is the "History" function under the "Tasks" menu, this shows a list of URLs visited in the current session.

As for installation, the installer program core-dumped on a fairly generic RedHat 6.2 system, fortunately, the binary tarball version worked fine.

While it still has a number of rough edges, Mozilla seems to be getting there and is well on its way to being a useful browser. We look forward to the upcoming releases and will continue to use the M16 version.

Browsers

WebLock for Mozilla. Doug Turner is working on a Mozilla add-on called WebLock that restricts the browser to a single web page, this is useful for keeping child-users from straying too far on the web.

Databases

MySQL 3.23.18 released. A new version of MySQL has been released. This is a development version that has support for big files and binary portable tables.

Education

SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report. Here's the latest SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report. It includes an update on the Red Escolar project and more.

Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching. A new project, called the Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching or OFSET, has been announced. "This organization will try to raise funds for development of free educational software, promote development of free educational software and coordinate the development of specific projects." They have put a manifesto online with more information on what they stand for.

Embedded Systems

RTLinux v3.0beta released. Here is the announcement for the beta release of RTLinux 3.0. It includes a number of new features; see the announcement for details.

Jemini embedded Java class library (LinuxDevices). You can now get a free, GPL licensed java compiler known as Jemini. "JEMIni is Websprocket's open source Java class library (.lang, .io, .util, .net) distribution. As a set of essential libraries supporting the Java language, JEMIni contains all of the current libraries from open source Java. JEMIni also includes Websprocket-developed packages for device, device driver, system resource management, device management, file management, real-time threads, and messaging."

Universal Plug and Play for Linux (Linuxdevices). Intel has released an open-source development kit for Universal Plug and Play on the Linux platform. "On Thursday, Intel said it will release as open source a Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) development kit for the Linux operating system. UPnP, originally developed by Microsoft Corp., is a technology that allows a number of different kinds of devices to communicate via a network using standard protocols, such as TCP/IP." The development kit is being released under a fairly restrictive Single Copy License

Interoperability

June 19 Wine Weekly News. The June 19 edition of the Wine Weekly News is out. Read about Wine 20000614, bug fixes, and unfixed bugs.

Network Management

OpenNMS weekly updates. Here are two new weekly summaries for the OpenNMS project. The June 14 edition discusses the JSNMP 0.2 release and licensing strategies. The June 20 June 20. edition discusses the JSNMP 0.2.1 release, and talks about the startup of a Bugzilla installation.

Office Applications

Gnucash 1.4 announcement. Here is the announcement for Gnucash 1.4. The program has undergone many changes. Among other things, this is the first stable release based on GNOME, and is probably the first that is suitable for a wide range of users.

Interview of the Gimp's Sven Neumann (LinuxPower). LinuxPower interviews Sven Neumann, one of the main developers of The Gimp. Gimp-2.0 will be a total rewrite. This doesn't mean that we will not reuse any code from the current codebase, but we want to change the basic architecture and build the most advanced image processing system out there.

Review of Gimp Developer's Conference. Read about the results from the recent Gimp Developer's Conference that was held in Berlin on June 2-4 this year. There you can find out the status of the current Gimp development and plans for Gimp version 2.

AbiWord 0.1.10 avaliable. A New Version of AbiWord has been released. Improvements include bug fixes and improved RTF imports.

Review of Balsa mail program (LinuxWorld). Joe Barr reviews the Gnome mail program Balsa in this LinuxWorld article. "Might I change my preference for GUI environment based solely on my choice of email? Absolutely. Mail is probably the most important application on my desktop machine these days."

On the Desktop

Possible KDE/GNOME interoperability?. Here's an article on Rivyn's KDE and GNOME News describing a possible merger of the KParts and Bonobo component architectures. Such a merger, if it happened, would allow for a great deal of interoperability between the two desktop environments. There is a lot that would have to happen to make such a merger work, and the article's suggestion that it could happen for KDE 2.0 seems hopelessly optimistic. But it is a good thing that the two groups are exploring the idea. "A merger between KParts and Bonobo, or KDE using Bonobo, will mean complete interoperability between KDE and Gnome. Nautilus could embed the Konqueror HTML engine, for instance. It basically would erase the blocks between KDE and Gnome, and allow limitless interoperability." (Thanks to Tim Hanson).

Gnumeric 0.56 Spreadsheet. A new release of the Gnumeric Spreadsheet has been announced. The release includes bug fixes, keyboard accelerators, and tearoff menus.

KDE 1.91 Kleopatra article (LinuxMall). Linux Mall's Greta Durr reviews the Kleopatra release of the KDE desktop. " For developers, KDE 1.91 provides a stable application program interface (API) which allows application developmennt, so they may plan their software releases to coincide with the release of KDE 2.0, scheduled for September of this year."

Science

Linux helps British scientists decode human DNA (ZDNet). British Scientists at Cambridge are using Linux to map the human DNA sequence. "Over three hundred Alpha-based Compaq TRU64 Unix systems as well as 60 Intel-powered Linux machines contributed to the huge number-crunching effort required to interpret the chemical make-up of a chromosome."

Web-site Development

Zope 2.1.6 Security Bulletin. See this week's LWN Security Page for information on a recent remotely exploitable Zope security hole in Zope 2.1.6 that is fixed by upgrading to Zope 2.1.7.

Zope Enterprise Objects (ZEO 0.2) released. ZEO 0.2, the first public release of the Zope Enterprise Objects package, is available here. ZEO is a wide-scale clustering package for Zope, allowing Zope sites to be distributed across a cluster of servers. See the ZEO Fact Sheet for an introduction to the technology.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

Project Links
Gnome
High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
YAMS
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

Perl

June 18 Perl5 Porters digest. The June 18 issue of the Perl5 Porters digest is out. Speed improvements for method calls and bytecode operations are discussed.

New Perl Modules. The latest Perl modules may be found at this site. Numerous HTML modules are included, among other things.

YAPC Conference Updates. Find out what is currently happening at the "Yet Another Perl Conference" which is being held at CMU in Pittsburgh, PA. An IRC chat line is available for those who want to participate.

Python

Two new Python-URLs. Here is the June 19 Dr. Dobb's Python-URL . Check it out for the latest in Python news, including a summary of what ActiveState is up to. Also, here is the June 15 Python-URL with discussions on Zope, and Python IDEs.

Python modules for XML (IBM). David Mertz has written This article on using the latest Python tools to work with XML.

Augmented Operators for Python. For those of you who miss the += forms of operators from C and C++, check out this patch from Thomas Wouters. Examples of the operators are given as they relate to the various Python data types.

O'Reilly Open Source Conference/Python. Here is a list of the Python Sessions at the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source Converence on July 17-20 in Monterey, CA.

Tcl/tk

Papers from the European TCL/TK Meeting. Carsten Zerbst submitted the following:

" The 1st European Tcl/Tk User Meeting is over now. About 70 participants from all over Europe came to Hamburg to discuss recent developments and present their work. Even Ajuba (ex Scriptics) sent the Tcl ambassador Jeffrey Hobbs to the user meeting.

Additionally several companies, mostly from the area of e-business presented themselves and tried to hire Tcl programmers. Most participants said that this event was a success. The papers presented at the meeting are available from this site. "

See also: this report from the user meeting posted by Jeffrey Hobbs.

Tcl-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for June 19, with coverage of the Tcl 8.4 roadmap and other development issues.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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